A full house congregated in Burlingame’s Peninsula Temple Sholom May 5 to remember the 6 million murdered in one of humanity’s worst genocides. The few hundred survivors of the Holocaust now living in the Bay Area were able to reconnect with one another and with other families during a program called “Witness to Liberation.”
Holocaust survivor George Heller is still haunted by his memories of the war. On his 81st birthday, he stood strong to address hundreds of congregants, both old and young. With traces of pain choking his voice, he looked up at the audience and said, “The war is over … but the memories live on.”
Heller had been through several Nazi concentration camps. His last was Gunskirchen in Austria, a slave labor camp, where “escaping was not an option.” Prisoners were surrounded by barbed wire fences, housed in 2-by-2-foot-square cells, with no roof in sight and only one water tap for groups of 150. Heller said prisoners like himself were lucky to sometimes get “a piece of potato.” His only hope was to put mind over matter.
“If I wanted to live,” he said, “I had to believe that I can make it.”
Herded from one camp to another, Heller ate grass that he found in the fields. “It was a miracle that I survived with no food or water for eight days at one point,” he said. Remembering those who perished, he vividly recalls the horrific image of a friend who suddenly collapsed midsentence and died inside Gunskirchen in 1945.
Also at Temple Beth Sholom was Floyd Dade Jr., a veteran tank commander and staff sergeant of the Army’s 761st Tank Battalion. On Yom HaShoah, he, too, is seen as a hero. Dade fought courageously, knowing the average survival of a tanker lasted from one to two weeks. “The Germans were on the move and we were moving west,” said the uniformed Dade.
When Dade’s jeep approached Gunskirchen, “It was just like a horror movie,” he said. Dead bodies were scattered all over the yard.
Those fortunate enough to survive were ravaged by the horrors of the Third Reich and enslavement camps. Take Heller, for example. When the U.S. Army liberated the few who remained standing inside the camp, Heller, at 21 years old, weighed a mere 84 pounds.
He went on to emigrate, study at MIT in Cambridge, Mass., and play a role in the birth of computer science.
Dade, meanwhile, was fighting on two fronts. Playing an active role in the first African American armored unit to enter combat, he says the prejudice he witnessed and experienced was a profound challenge in his fight for racial freedom. Just as Heller bore witness to his friend’s death, Dade took in African American lynching. In 1978, the nation recognized Dade for his heroic fight for humanity.
Two worlds apart, these two strangers worked a common platform. “And the exodus to freedom,” says Heller, “was indeed a slow and steady march.”